The Samsung vs Apple battle continues on, with the latest ruling being the throwing out of $400M in damages. A unanimous Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out the almost $400 million in damages Samsung was ordered to pay Apple in a long-standing dispute over the patents of elements of smartphones. The justices ruled that Samsung does not have to pay Apple patent damages based on the profits for the entire device, only the components at issue, and reversed and remanded the case back down to a lower court.

The new Bluetooth spec has been officially ratified. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group officially ratified its version 5, which includes a modular set of optional extensions for throughput, range, and other features. Chip makers, including Cypress and Nordic, are already sampling parts supporting the specs that do not include mesh networking, a piece delayed until mid-2017.

The Pebble smartwatch brand seems to be dead, leaving customers in the lurch. “One-to-one Pebble support is no longer available” and “any Pebble currently out in the wild is no longer covered by or eligible for warranty exchange.” This means, no matter when you purchased or received your Pebble device, you are on your own—and if your device dies, you’re simply out a device. Any warranty you might have been promised from Pebble directly is void.

Windows 10 will apparently overtake Windows 7 within a year. It's interesting that it didn't overtake it during the time that, you know, Windows 10 was free. Extrapolating those adoption lines, we can see that Windows 10 is on track to overtake Windows 7. While the December 2017 date shown in the graph might be a bit optimistic, there's no doubt that a year or so from now, the dominant desktop OS will be Windows 10, not Windows 7.

Tech Report have been playing around with the Internet of Things, to make dumb machines smarter. Sometimes I forget things. In particular, I forget to transfer my clean but wet laundry from the washing machine to the dryer. When this happens, I have to waste time, detergent, electricity, and water to re-wash the clothes. My wife's sister has an expensive race-car-red washing machine that plays a few cheerful musical notes when the cycle is finished. That reminder is helpful, and my better half likes the little tune, but I figured I could get crafty and make the dumb old washer and dryer whisper in my ear through the internet. Here's how I did it.

PCI SSDs are all the rage in laptops now. The number of notebooks built to use SSDs, which are based on NAND flash, exceeded analyst expectations this quarter, and the industry is on pace to surpass the 50% adoption rate in the 2017 to 2018 timeframe, according to a report from DRAMeXchange.

However Sniper sends word that the prices of SSDs are spiking due to NAND shortages. We began reporting on the first signs of the looming NAND shortage all the way back in May, and have touched on the domino effect in many articles over the ensuing months as it unfolded. Now the shortage is in full swing: DRAMeXchange reported that the average price of MLC SSDs rose this quarter between 6%-10%, while TLC SSDs also rose 6%-9%. We also reached out to Trendfocus, whose projections indicate even higher price hikes at both the retail and OEM level.

BC spotted this interesting article about one aspect of autonomous cars. It should be technically and theoretically possible for an autonomous car to drive with input not just from its array of cameras and sensors, but from a set of pre-recorded data from another car. The data that can be recorded – and, in the case of almost every drive-by-wire car made today is recorded – is significant: throttle position, steering wheel angle, brake pressure, weight balance, speed, wheel slippage, and, of course, GPS data about where the car goes.

Here's some info from Malakai about the 2G shutdown in Oz: Telstra will be the first carrier to switch off its 2G network on the first of December, at which time anyone using a 2G mobile phone or a 2G SIM card will no longer be able to make phone calls or send text messages. Even calls to emergency services may no longer connect. Also Optus will switch off its 2G network in April - affecting Virgin Mobile, amaysim and Dodo customers - while Vodafone's 2G network will be decommissioned in September 2017. A lesser known side-effect of the shutdown of the 2G network is that most dual SIM phones except the very latest and greatest ones can only use the secondary SIM via the 2G network. So many people using dual SIM phones might be caught unawares when their secondary SIM stops working tomorrow. Or today, even! More info here and here.

Google's powers now extend to messing with the spacetime continuum.. kinda. No commonly used operating system is able to handle a minute with 61 seconds, and trying to special-case the leap second has caused many problems in the past. Instead of adding a single extra second to the end of the day, we'll run the clocks 0.0014% slower across the ten hours before and ten hours after the leap second, and “smear” the extra second across these twenty hours. For timekeeping purposes, December 31 will seem like any other day.

PC bits retailer MSY are in hot water over warranty issues. “The ACCC alleges that MSY Technology breached the Australian Consumer Law by misrepresenting consumers’ rights to a repair, replacement, or a refund when they have purchased faulty products,” ACCC Commissioner Sarah Court said. “Businesses must not mislead consumers about their consumer guarantee rights. Consumers who have purchased a faulty product have a right under the consumer guarantees to remedies which businesses cannot restrict, alter, or remove.”

I don't normally link buyer's guides, but I thought it might be interesting to see what people are looking at during the run up to Xmas. Tech Report have a Christmas Gift Guide, while Techgage have a GPU Upgrade & New Build guide. On the lookout for a new graphics card? We’ve put together a guide to help you pick the right graphics card for your budget. For new builds or upgrades, there are an assortment of GPUs to pick in each price range. Competative eSports on a budget, to ultrawide or multi-monitor gaming, there’s something for everyone.

Techspot also looked at real-world storage performance. To test and visualize how storage performance impacts the user experience in real world scenarios we recorded how quickly our Core i7-6700K test system completes various tasks using Samsung’s new 960 Evo 500GB SSD, then compared against the value-minded Crucial MX300 and the WD Red Pro 4TB mechanical hard drive.

ISPs in the UK are now required to keep a full list of sites visited by their customers and provide it to authorities upon request. The Investigatory Powers Bill, which was all but passed into law this week, forces internet providers to keep a full list of internet connection records (ICRs) for a year and to make them available to the Government if asked. Those ICRs in effect serve as a full list of every website that people have visited, rather than collecting which specific pages are visited or what's done on them. Expect a big upturn in VPN usage.

There's another huge IBM and NVIDIA-powered supercomputer on the way. More than once during the SC16 supercomputing conference this week in Salt Lake City, the Summit system and its companion “Sierra” system that will be deployed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, were referred to as “AI supercomputers.” This is a reflection of the fact that the national labs around the world are being asked to do machine learning on the same machines that would normally just do simulation and modeling to advance science, not just to advance the art of computation but to make these systems all look more cool and more useful.

We're definitely seeing another period of consolidation in the semiconductor market. In the past couple of weeks, Siemens signed a deal to buy Mentor Graphics for $4 billion, and Samsung purchased Harman, a Tier 1 automotive supplier for $8 billion. What’s different is that deals worth multiple billions of dollars—sometimes tens of billions—are no longer extraordinary. When Texas Instruments paid $7.6 billion for Burr-Brown in 2000, it was considered a jaw-dropping amount of money.

Matt sent in this game bundle, with up to 151 games being offered for as little as $2 in total, raising money for a good cause. This is A Good Bundle. A bunch of creators are sharing their works to combat some of the ugliness in our world. 100% of the proceeds from this bundle will be split 50-50 between the ACLU ( American Civil Liberties Union) and Planned Parenthood.

I don't often post press releases as news, but this one caught my eye. It's from FSP (who I should note are currently sponsoring OCAU) and it's for a new "Twins" PSU which gives you two redundant PSUs in a normal desktop ATX PSU form-factor. I don't think I've seen that before. See here for more info, or the pics below.

Voice-enabled smart homes continue to get closer, with Amazon's Echo and others - but there's a new option from China, the LingLong DingDong. Certainly rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Three commands wake the device: DingDong DingDong, Xiaowei Xiaowei (a girl’s nickname), and BaiLing BaiLing (skylark). The DingDong comes in Mandarin and Cantonese versions (the engines required to understand the languages are too complex to include them both in one device). Most people speak Mandarin, and the myriad accents and dialects present a Herculean challenge. Still, the company claims the DingDong understands roughly 95 percent of the population.

Gigabyte have a video of an immersion-cooled server (FB video only, it seems). You might have seen servers, but you've never seen servers THIS COOL! Yes, it's a server! Yes, it's a server in a full tank, performance cooled!

From the "OK, but why" department comes this video of DooM running on the new MacBook Pro's touch bar. I get the fun of making Doom run on everything from a potato to a toaster, but come on. If you’re confused by my incredulation, then that’s because you haven’t seen Doom running in the not-even-a-thumbnail-wide touch bar that comes with the new Apple Macbook Pro laptops.

A new study seems to indicate a drop in piracy in Australia. TNS estimates that in the first three months of the year, 23 per cent of Australian Internet users aged 12+ consumed “at least one item of online content unlawfully” — equating to about 4.6 million people. The 2015 study found that some 26 per cent of Australians were believed to have unlawfully consumed online content.

Steam are accepting nominations for game awards. For the first time in human history, our Steam Community will decide the nominees for the prestigious Steam Awards. This November you will get to choose nominees for 8 different categories as well as have the opportunity to create your very own award category.

TechARP report on the past, present and future of the game industry, with an interview with Ian Livingstone. Level Up KL 2016 was a great opportunity for game developers in Asia to meet up, and learn from each other. Industry luminaries like Wan Hazmer and Rami Ismail gave talks on creating a triple A game title like Final Fantasy XV, and how a new developer can survive the development of their first game. But MDEC (Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation) saved the best for last – Ian Livingstone CBE. We were so fortunate to be able to meet him in person, and listen to him talk about the past, present and future of the game industry. Join us for this once-in-a-lifetime experience!

People are concerned about new surveillance laws in the UK. The Investigatory Powers Act, passed on Thursday, legalises a whole range of tools for snooping and hacking by the security services unmatched by any other country in western Europe or even the US.

It looks like the Windows command line may be replaced by PowerShell. Microsoft is continuing to clear out old code from Windows, making PowerShell the default command line shell in its latest Windows 10 release. PowerShell will start up via the file explorer in the latest insider preview build 14971 instead of the cmd.exe command prompt.

HardOCP checked out Google Earth VR with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. If you have ever experienced Google Earth, which you likely have, and were impressed with the experience, just imagine having a globe about 6 feet across that you can zoom into so close that you can then stand on the street and look up and appreciate the skyscrapers. So what kind of GPU do you need for this VR application?

Backblaze have published another round of hard drive stats. As always this data should be treated with care, but it's interesting because it involves their migration to 8TB drives. The Seagate 8 TB drives are doing very well. Their annualized failure rate compares favorably to the HGST 2 TB hard drives. With the average age of the HGST drives being 66 months, their failure rate was likely to rise, simply because of normal wear and tear. The average age of the Seagate 8 TB hard drives is just 3 months, but their 1.6% failure rate during the first few months bodes well for a continued low failure rate going forward.

ITNews have an interesting article about implementing blockchain technology in Australia. Westpac and the Australian Stock Exchange have taken very different paths on their journeys with blockchain, but they both agree on one thing: the technology is way overhyped. Blockchain has hit the “peak of inflated expectations”, according to Gartner’s 2016 hype cycle for emerging technologies, but is yet to reach the point of disillusionment, nor to achieve widespread adoption.

If you're hungry for a space fix, Teddybear pointed out that the GOES-R weather satellite will launch on the back of an Atlas V rocket in a few minutes. GOES-R will be launched by United Launch Alliance (ULA), using an Atlas V rocket. The vehicle, which has tail number AV-069, will be flying in the 541 configuration, with a five-metre (16.4-foot) payload fairing, four AJ-60A solid rocket motors augmenting a Common Core Booster first stage, and a single-engine Centaur upper stage.

If you're in NZ, I hope you're not too badly affected by the series of earthquakes that have hit over the last couple of days. Aftershocks continued throughout Monday morning. Many schools and offices stayed closed while engineers checked the buildings, and ferries and trains were cancelled.

Tonight and tomorrow night a super moon will be visible from Australia (and everywhere else). "Enjoy it, you don't need a telescope or binoculars, although they would make it look nice. "It's a free show and you won't see this again for a long time. "This was last seen in 1948 and won't be seen until 2034. Even if you couldn't give two hoots about the Moon, it's something you can do with the kids."

I keep telling my kids that one day we'll be able to just ask an invisible computer questions, like on Star Trek - HWSecrets checked out Google Home, which launched recently. I must say that constantly calling the Home device “OK Google” was very tiresome. I felt like I was constantly doing an advertisement for Google. In comparison, talking to the Echo by calling the name “Alexa” did not bother me a bit and it made her feel like part of the family. One comfortable thing about the Home is that when you say “OK Google, Good Morning”, she will respond with weather, news, traffic and other personalized daily facts that you have chosen in the app.

Or you could shortcut the whole thing with a brain implant. A paralysed woman has learned to use a brain implant to communicate by thought alone. It is the first time a brain–computer interface has been used at home in a person’s day-to-day life, without the need for doctors and engineers to recalibrate the device. “It’s special to be the first,” says HB, who is 58 years old and wishes to remain anonymous. She was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2008. The disease ravages nerve cells, leaving people unable to control their bodies.

Meanwhile Spotify has been thrashing storage. For almost five months—possibly longer—the Spotify music streaming app has been assaulting users' storage devices with enough data to potentially take years off their expected lifespans. Reports of tens or in some cases hundreds of gigabytes being written in an hour aren't uncommon, and occasionally the recorded amounts are measured in terabytes. The overload happens even when Spotify is idle and isn't storing any songs locally.

Today of course is Remembrance Day. Remembrance Day (sometimes known informally as Poppy Day) is a memorial day observed in Commonwealth of Nations member states since the end of the First World War to remember the members of their armed forces who have died in the line of duty.

So, Trump is (soon to be) president. Meanwhile, in Australia, a man may be fined for using a drone to get a sausage for a mate. A man who only wants to be known as "Tim" has admitted he was part of a team that flew a drone to pick up a sausage from Bunnings and deliver it to a friend waiting in an outdoor spa in Sunbury.

Speaking of drones, GoPro's new Karma has been recalled. GoPro is committed to providing our customers with great product experiences. To honor this commitment, we have recalled Karma until we resolve a performance issue related to a loss of power during operation. We plan to resume shipment of Karma once the issue is addressed.

New proposed legislation brings a national security twist to telco operations. Telcos will similarly be required to inform the department about any changes they plan to make to their systems or services that could have a "material adverse impact" on their obligation to secure their networks. Types of changes the government says it should be notified about include outsourcing or offshoring sensitive parts of a network, buying kit or services for a sensitive part of a network, and changes to the management of services.

On a related note, Australia now has a cyber ambassador. Infosec academic and policy advisor Dr Tobias Feakin will become Australia’s first cyber ambassador, filling a diplomatic role created by the government’s April cyber security strategy. Feakin's appointment makes him a key counterpart to the Prime Minister’s special adviser on cybersecurity, Alastair MacGibbon, leading international efforts to stamp out cyber crime.